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The first book printed at Oxford is the very rare Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed attributed to St. Jerome, the colophon of which is dated 17 December, Anno domini Mcccclxviij. It is improbable that a book was printed at Oxford so early as 1468; and the bibliographers are on various grounds agreed that an x has been omitted. If so, Oxford must be content to date the beginning of its Press from the year 1478; while Westminster, its only English precursor, produced its first book from Caxton’s press in 1477.

The first printer was Theodoric Rood, who came to England from Cologne, and looked after the Press until about 1485; soon after which date the first Press came to an end. The second Press lasted from 1517 until 1520, and was near Merton College. Some twenty-three books are known to have issued from these Presses; they are for the most part classical or theological works in Latin. There is no doubt that this early Press was really the University Press; for many of the books have the imprint in Alma Universitate Oxoniae or the like, some bear the University Arms, and some are issued with the express privilege of the Chancellor of the University.

Device used on the back of the title of Sphæra Civitatis Oxford 1588

After 1520 there is a gap in the history, which begins again in 1585. The Chancellor of that time was Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester, who in the first issue of the new Press is celebrated as its founder. Convocation in 1584 had appointed a committee De Libris imprimendis, and in 1586 the University lent £100 to an Oxford bookseller, Joseph Barnes, to carry on a press. In the next year an ordinance of the Star Chamber allowed one press at Oxford, and one apprentice in addition to the master printer. Barnes managed the Press until 1617, and printed many books now prized by collectors, among them the first book printed at Oxford in Greek (the Chrysostom of 1586), the first book with Hebrew type (1596), Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon, and Captain John Smith’s Map of Virginia.

FOUR FOUNDERS OF THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester

Archbishop Laud

Dr. John Fell

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon

THE INTERIOR OF THE OLD CONGREGATION HOUSE

The first printing-house owned by the University; used for storing Oriental type and printing-furniture, 1652.

Upper part of the first page of the Oxford (now London) Gazette, 1665. The oldest newspaper still existing in England

The first notable promoter of the Oxford Press was Archbishop Laud, whose statutes contemplate the appointment of an Architypographus, and who secured for the University in 1632 Letters Patent authorizing three printers (each with two presses and two apprentices), and in 1636 a Royal Charter entitling the University to print ‘all manner of books’. The privilege of printing the Bible was not exercised at this date; but in 1636 Almanacks were produced, and this seems to have alarmed the Stationers’ Company, who then enjoyed a virtual monopoly of Bibles, Grammars, and Almanacks; for we find that in 1637 the University surrendered the privilege to the Stationers for an annual payment of £200, twice the amount of Joseph Barnes’s working capital. The most famous books belonging to what may be called the Laudian period were five editions of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and one of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning in English.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY ARMS

Some ancient examples used by the Oxford University Press

From The History of Lapland by John Shefferus, 1674, the first anthropological book published by the Press

The work of the Press during the Civil War is of interest to historians and bibliographers on account of the great number of Royalist Pamphlets and Proclamations issued while the Court of Charles I was at Oxford; a number swollen in appearance by those printed in London with counterfeit Oxford imprints. But this period is not important in the history of the Learned Press; and after 1649 it suffered a partial eclipse which did not pass until the Restoration.

From W. Maundrell’s Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem, Oxford, 1703, engraved by M. Burghers

The history of the Press in the latter part of the seventeenth century will always be connected with the name of the second of its great patrons, Dr. John Fell, Dean of Christ Church and Bishop of Oxford. Fell made the great collection of type-punches and matrices from which the beautiful types known by his name are still cast at Oxford; he promoted the setting up of a paper mill at Wolvercote, where Oxford paper is still made; he conducted the long, and ultimately successful, struggle with the Stationers and the King’s Printers, from which the history of Oxford Bibles and Prayer Books begins (1675). In 1671 he and three others took over the management of the Press, paying the University £200 a year and spending themselves a large sum upon its development. Lastly, it seems that he suggested to Archbishop Sheldon the provision, due to his munificence, of the new and spacious printing house and Theatre which still bears his name. The Press was installed there in 1669, and began to issue the long series of books which bear the imprint Oxoniae e Theatro Sheldoniano, or in the vulgar tongue Oxford at the Theater. These imprints, indeed, were still used, at times, long after the Press had been moved from the Sheldonian to its next home in the Clarendon Building. Many learned folios were printed at this time, including pioneer work by Oxford students of Oriental languages; the book best remembered to-day is no doubt Anthony Wood’s Historia et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis published in 1674.

To this period belongs also the first exercise of the privilege to print Bibles and Prayer Books, which was recognized, as we have seen, at least as early as 1637, when the Stationers’ Company paid the University to refrain from printing Bibles. This agreement lasted until 1642, and, by renewal at intervals, until 1672, when it was at length denounced; and in 1675 a quarto English Bible was printed at the Theater, and a beginning made of what has become an extensive and highly technical process of manufacture and distribution.

Early in the eighteenth century the Press acquired, with a new habitation, a name still in very general use. The University was granted the perpetual copyright of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (a possession in which it was confirmed by the Copyright Act of 1911); and the Clarendon Building was built chiefly from the profits accruing from the sales of that book. Many editions were printed in folio at various dates; and the Press Catalogue still offers the fine edition of 1849, with the notes of Bishop Warburton, in seven volumes octavo, and that of the Life in two volumes, 1857; the whole comprising over 5,000 pages and sold for £4 10s. Still cheaper is the one-volume edition of 1843, in 1,366 pages royal octavo, the price of which is 21s. More recently the demands of piety have been still further satisfied by the issue of a new edition based on fresh collations made from the manuscript by the late Dr. Macray. Though the Clarendon Building long since ceased to be a printing house, one of its rooms is still The Delegates’ Room; and there the Delegates of the Press hold their stated meetings.

In the eighteenth century the Bible Press grew in strength with the co-operation of London booksellers and finally with the establishment (in 1770, if not earlier) of its own Bible Warehouse in Paternoster Row. The Learned Press, on the other hand, though some important books were produced, suffered from the general apathy which then pervaded the University. Sir William Blackstone, having been appointed a Delegate, found that his colleagues did not meet, or met only to do nothing; and addressed to the Vice-Chancellor a vigorous pamphlet, in which he described the Press as ‘languishing in a lazy obscurity, and barely reminding us of its existence, by now and then slowly bringing forth a Program, a Sermon printed by request, or at best a Bodleian Catalogue’. The great lawyer’s polemic gradually battered down the ramparts of ignorant negligence, and the Press began to revive under the new statute which he promoted. Dr. Johnson in 1767 was able to assure his sovereign that the authorities at Oxford ‘had put their press under better regulation, and were at that time printing Polybius’.

The Three University Presses

The Clarendon Building is not large, and the Press very soon outgrowing it was partly housed in various adjacent buildings, until in 1826-30 the present Press in Walton Street was erected. It is remarkable that though the building is more like a college than a factory—it is of the quadrangular plan regular in Oxford—and was built when printing was still mainly a handicraft, it has been found possible to adapt its solid fabric and spacious rooms to modern processes with very little structural alteration. Extensive additions, however, have been and are even now being made.

The activities of the nineteenth century are too various to detail; but a few outstanding facts claim mention. The Bible business continued to prosper, and gained immensely in variety by the introduction of Oxford India paper and by the publication, in conjunction with Cambridge, of the Revised Version of the Old and New Testaments. Earlier in the century there was a period of great activity in the production of editions of the Classics, in which Gaisford played a great part and to which many foreign scholars like Wyttenbach and Dindorf gave their support. Later, in the Secretaryships of Kitchin (for many years afterwards Dean of Durham) and of Bartholomew Price, new ground was broken with the famous Clarendon Press Series of school books by such scholars as Aldis Wright, whose editions of Shakespeare have long served as a quarry for successive editors. The New English Dictionary began to be published in 1884. Meanwhile the manufacturing powers of the Press at Oxford and the selling powers of the publishing house in London were very widely extended by the energies of Mr. Horace Hart and Mr. Henry Frowde, and the foundations were laid of the great and multifarious enterprises which belong to the history of the last twenty years.

THE QUADRANGLE OF THE UNIVERSITY PRESS AT OXFORD

Fire-place in the Delegates’ Room Clarendon Building

Grinling Gibbons Fire-place in one of the London Offices

The growth of the Press in the first two decades of the present century is due to the co-operation of a large number of individuals: of the members of the University who have acted as Delegates; of their officers, managers, and employees; and of the authors of Oxford books. In so far, however, as this period of its history can be identified with the name of one man, it will be remembered as that in which the late Charles Cannan served the Delegates as Secretary. The Delegates at his death placed on record their judgement that he had made an inestimable contribution to the prosperity and usefulness of the Press. The Times Literary Supplement, in reviewing the last edition of the Oxford University Roll of Service, gave some account of the services performed by the University in the war. One paragraph dealt with the work of the Press:—

‘Probably no European Press did more to propagate historical and ethical truth about the war. The death of its Secretary, Charles Cannan, a year ago, has left an inconsolable regret among all those more fortunate Oxford men, old and young, who had the honour to be acquainted with one of the finest characters and most piercing intelligences of our time. He was a very great man, and is alive to-day in the spirit of the institution which he enriched with his personality and his life.’